Excerpts

People tend to assume they know exactly what the Cold War was and when it ended. Anders Stephanson argues that this standard chronology doesn’t fit the facts.

Conflicts over Israel’s founding encompassed religion, race, and politics.

He misrepresented the history of the gym-class test. I know because I served on the council that helped modernize it.

The United States has forgotten the radical German American immigrant socialists who spilled blood for antislavery and other liberatory causes.

Coaches have long sacralized the gridiron, extolling it alongside faith, family and the military as a setting stone of the social order.

"It is only stereotypes of Indians as primitive that make their power to transform markets surprising."

NASA recently announced a partnership with a couture designer, but in the 1960s, the first spacesuits were made by a company known for bras and girdles.

As a clergyman and physician, his medical practice, his chronic illnesses, and his theology were intertwined throughout his life.

How and why ideas like germ theory are pursued, accepted or ignored, and how human habits of the mind can make it difficult to ask the right questions.

For as long as the United States has had nuclear weapons, officials have struggled with how to transport the destructive technology.

Investigators never reached a conclusion about the death of Pullman porter J. H. Wilkins, but his killing revealed much about the dangers of his profession.

In 1861, Edward Payson Weston walked the 500 miles from Boston to D.C., and launched a legendary career as a pedestrian in the process.

In 1864 San Francisco, Twain found hardship, Bohemia, and his voice—transforming from local reporter to rising literary force.

In 1880s Texas, farmers and factory workers discovered they had the same enemy: corporate capitalists.

On daguerreotypes, William Henry Fox Talbot, and darkroom dangers.

Correspondence about writing, travel, and friendship, from 1926 through 1929.

Self-professed defenders of free speech have become the most fervent advocates and agents of government censorship in the twenty-first century.

On the intersection of environmental contamination and violence in the Pacific Northwest.

The psychiatric hospitals promoted by Thomas Story Kirkbride and Dorothea Dix were quickly overcrowded and underfunded — a failure that haunts us today.

The AJC wielded its editorial power to pave the path for Cop City and the 1906 race massacre, directly harming Black Atlantans.

On the abolitionists, Reconstruction, and winning “freedom” from the Right.

With his strange machines and an uncanny, intuitive understanding of muscles, Joseph Pilates created a new technique for improving strength and movement.

Despite seeming like strange dance partners, disco and classical make the best music—together.

The unique brutality of the US capitalist class bred a labor movement that has often limited itself to being a private insurance provider.

In the mid-1800s, shady milk purveyors found it was cheaper to keep cows in cities and feed them the byproducts of whiskey manufacturing. The results were dire.

Historians have long grappled with “the American Paradox” of Revolutionary leaders who fought for their own liberty while denying it to enslaved Black people.

In Ozzy Osbourne's hands, Satan gave a middle finger to hypocrisy and fearmongering.

George Lunn, socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York rose to power in 1911 by making a difference in people's lives.

The 1893 World’s Fair and the origins of Aunt Jemima.

America’s epistemic challenges run deeper than social media.

Over the past several decades, concerns about costs and producing short-term results have narrowed the NIH’s impact.

A roving history makes the case for shade’s centrality to public health, climate adaptation, and even a more robust and inclusive public sphere.

The two-month patrol stopped “suspicious” individuals from crossing into California. But its execution was uneven, and the initiative proved controversial.

Muir Woods National Monument added contextual notes to signs, filling in historical gaps. The Trump administration removed them.

Dishing the African diaspora in Brazil and the United States.

Perhaps the oldest continuously available video game ever made; its history in documents and objects.

Getty Images has released new photos of the Kent State shootings, 49 years after they happened.

How the “obstetrical dilemma” and the dark history of pelvimetry met in the present.

How the March of Dimes used children to raise money for polio research.

From slum clearance to beatnik protests, how Greenwich Village became a battleground over race, art, and redevelopment.

The domestic and international dynamics of the early days of the Civil War.

The rise and fall of Communists in New York’s hotel union reveals how socialists gained, wielded, and ultimately lost power in the U.S. labor movement.

A haunting exploration of “My Old Kentucky Home” reveals how a minstrel song rooted in slavery became a nostalgic American icon embedded in consumer culture.

“Girl on Girl,” by the critic Sophie Gilbert, is the latest in a series of consciousness-raising-style reappraisals of the decade’s formative texts.

Knowledge workers, were supposed to be the beneficiaries of neoliberalism and globalization until AI and a hypercompetitive employment market.

In 1872, former slave Mary Virginia Montgomery, now a cotton plantation owner, records her life’s changes after moving from slavery to self-sufficiency.

The agency once projected America’s loftiest ideals. Then it ceded its ambitions to Elon Musk.

On the preparation and aftershocks of the attack that marked the beginning of the Nuclear Age.

Gen. Leslie Groves promoted Oppenheimer as the atomic bomb's inventor to craft a propaganda narrative, obscuring the true creators and moral implications.

JFK's presidential win in 1960 offers a guide for how Democrats can rebound in 2025.